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Comment Bad science reporting (Score 2) 155

On average, people used content warnings to avoid looking at / engaging with content some of the time. On a scale from 1 (always skipped) to 8 (always opened), the average was 5.61. Almost two thirds (63.9%) used content warnings to selectively ignore some content.

This is very far from an anti-content warning outcome. It's saying that content warnings are at least somewhat useful.

Content warnings can relate to a wide range of topics. A single person is likely to have a small number of topics that they wish to avoid. So it shouldn't be surprising that most people often view content after seeing the content warnings.

Comment Re:has anyone calculated cooling impacts? (Score 1) 76

We put a ton of money and engineering into reducing network latency well below 0.1 seconds. For stuff on the scale of Facebook, for instance, latency is addressed by moving data to where it's likely to be used next. (If you go on a trip to another continent, Facebook will copy your profile data to a datacenter on that continent.) In low Earth orbit, the satellite will make a complete orbit in just a couple hours, so you'd be needing to move data constantly. Or you'd eat the latency of moving data from the far side of the world.

If you want to use geostationary orbit to handle that problem, you've got as much latency as your datacenter being halfway across the world, because information moves through copper wire about two thirds as fast as the speed of light. If that were generally considered acceptable, today you'd see most companies just putting datacenters wherever it's convenient and not worrying about getting close to the end user.

Your orbital datacenters need to host applications that either require little local storage (so it doesn't matter which satellite you use) or are very insensitive to latency (so it doesn't matter that you're connecting to a satellite that's 35,000km away).

Generative AI and some types of supercomputing might fit the bill. But both are power-hungry and therefore cooling-hungry. Cooling stuff in space is hard.

Schmidt is letting his sci-fi imagination run wild and ignoring practical realities.

Comment Deorbiting isn't good either (Score 2) 31

Deorbiting a satellite generally means it gets vaporized. How safe is the resulting material? Do we want it in our atmosphere? There aren't any international regulations establishing caps for this sort of pollution.

There are two ways to address the problem. The first and simplest is to put fewer satellites in orbit. The second is to deorbit them intact, which can take a lot of mass budget. Nobody makes money from this, though, so it's not going to happen.

Comment Spitting on creators (Score 3, Insightful) 15

Kilby Blades effectively said that hiring a ghost writer is the same as writing. All she had to say was "We request that your wordcount reflect what you wrote." It isn't surprising that a group of writers entering a writing challenge have strong opinions about people submitting stuff they actually wrote!

I've heard a rumor that she was disrespectful to the volunteers. Events like this depend so much on volunteers, you really need to take care of them.

Comment Failure is the point (Score 3, Insightful) 338

They aren't trying to produce a modernized system that does the same tasks just as well. They want to produce a buggy, broken version that denies people the benefits they earned.

Killing off a functioning system that many people rely on is best done in inches. If they migrate people over little by little, if the payments become unreliable rather than vanishing, fewer people take to the streets in any given month. And once people are contemptuous toward social security, it's easier to remove it via legislation.

Comment Re:dumbfucks (Score 0) 49

DEI is just anti-discrimination. They didn't preemptively cut out part of their potential workforce, you say, so they're about to fail. Bonkers.

Meanwhile, they're spending money on advertising platforms and AI and other things nobody asked for. Things that take away from their core business and cost a lot of money.

Comment Re:Decentralization just feels like an occulted mo (Score 1, Interesting) 170

Bluesky has some decentralized aspects, but all the data has to go through a relay, and that's sufficiently expensive that only Bluesky has one running. This means that Bluesky's moderation applies to everyone.

Mastodon is heavily decentralized. My instance doesn't rely on anyone else's servers. No large corporation can moderate my messages globally. There's smaller scale moderation, which is quite necessary to deal with hate speech and organized harassment. But the only people who can moderate my speech across the whole network are the admins of my instance.

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